The Girl From the Train

by Irma Joubert

  “I didn’t know there was a war in the Union of South Africa as well,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “but it was long, long ago. Don’t say the Union of South Africa every time, just say South Africa.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Kobus taught her to skip stones in the reservoir. He selected a handful of flat pebbles, drew back his arm, leaned back with his body, picked up his front foot, and launched a stone across the water. If it bounced on the water once, it was a cow. Every additional bounce was a calf. Kobus sometimes threw a cow and five calves. “Did you see, Grietjie, did you see?” he would shout.

  At first her stones simply plonked into the water, but before they went back home she could throw a cow.

  During the day her mommy taught her Afrikaans and told her about Jan van Riebeeck and Slagtersnek and the Great Trek and the Boer War because Gretl had to know about these things before she went to the Afrikaans school. She learned music as well. She could read some of the notes on the sheet music and play them on the piano.

  On the Tuesday of Kobus’s vacation, when her father was attending an emergency meeting of the Farmers’ Agricultural Union, and Kobus had hitched the wooden water-cart behind the Fergie to spray the citrus trees, Gretl and her mother went to Cohen Crown General Dealer to buy school supplies. They bought black lace-up shoes and more white socks, this time without frills. They bought white shirts with short sleeves and two black school dresses with belts, called gyms. They also bought a white hat with a hatband and elastic under the chin, called a Panama hat. In another part of the store they bought a satchel, pencils, a box with twenty-four colored crayons, an eraser, and a sharpener. The pencils, eraser, and sharpener went into a wooden pencil case with a sliding lid.

  Her mommy allowed her to pick out her own lunchbox. They were all so pretty that she didn’t know which one to choose. At last she chose a tin with a picture of two kittens on the lid, because they looked so warm and sleepy.

  At home she laid out everything on the dining room table for her father and Kobus to inspect when they came home. She could hardly wait to go to school.

  “Let me know if the children give you any trouble,” Kobus said that evening. “They know me. I’ll give them hell.”

  “Kobus!” their mommy scolded. “Watch your language!”

  “Sorry, Mom. But, Mom, I just want Grietjie to know, Mom.”

  “Thanks,” said Grietjie. She had noticed at church that Kobus was much taller than his friends. But she would rather not tell him if the children were nasty to her.

  Alone in bed that night, she didn’t know whether she was looking forward to school quite as much anymore. She clutched her wooden cross and her blanky for comfort.

  On the Sunday before she had to go to school she was baptized Magrieta Katharina Neethling in the Afrikaans church. Magrieta was the Afrikaans name for Gretl, Mommy explained, and Katharina was her mother’s full name. Kobus had been baptized Jakobus Johannes Neethling, after his grandpa Grootkoos, who had been dead for a long time.

  It was sweltering and not at all beautiful inside the church. There were no colored pictures in the windows, no candles, not a picture of the Holy Virgin with the Child in sight, not even one of Lieber Herr Jesus on the cross. In fact, there wasn’t a single cross to be seen. A lady with thick calves pumped the organ, extracting a series of bleating noises that dripped from the walls and ceiling like thick syrup. The people didn’t sing well either. The organ seemed to drag the notes from their throats. Some of the ladies were especially bad. She wished they could hear the nuns’ choir just once, or the boys’ choir at evening mass.

  As she stood between her mother and father in front of the congregation in her white dress, she wondered if God didn’t feel a bit despondent at having to receive her yet again. She couldn’t remember being baptized Gretl Christina Schmidt in the Deutsche Luthersche Kirche, but she vaguely remembered Oma taking her and Elza to the rabbi in the synagogue. And she remembered very well how the priest had blessed her and the other girls in the cathedral on the green foothills of Jasna Góra.

  After church everyone wanted to kiss and hug her yet again. The men crowded round her daddy, as they did every Sunday after church, discussing things like cattle and tractors and the price of corn. Her mommy held her hand tightly, but Gretl knew by now that Mommy couldn’t save her from the sweaty ladies.

  Gretl woke up early Monday morning. She couldn’t eat Maria’s maize porridge. Her father prayed that the Lord would watch over her at school. Her mother struggled to tie the white ribbon in her hair. She wanted Gretl to look pretty on her first school day.

  Her mother got out of the car and went with her to the principal’s office, where Gretl had to be registered. This time she had a mommy to do it for her. All the children on the playground stopped what they were doing and looked at them. She heard them talk as she and her mommy walked past.

  “We’ll try her in standard three and see how it goes,” said the principal. “Standards two and three share a classroom, so if she finds the work too hard, she can join the standard twos.”

  A bell rang and all the children from grade one to standard five formed five neat lines in front of the veranda. In the last line were the children of the special class, where younger and older children shared the same classroom. The principal read a passage from the Bible and prayed. The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky. Then the children filed into the classrooms.

  There were four female teachers and the principal, who was in charge of the combined standard four and five class. Gretl and her mommy went to a door that said Standard 2 and Standard 3, Miss Grobler.

  Gretl’s mouth was bone-dry, and the lump in her tummy had moved up to her throat.

  “Come inside,” said the teacher.

  They entered the stuffy classroom. Twenty pairs of eyes stared at them, following their every movement.

  “Ag, shame, is this our little orphan?” asked Miss Grobler. She had a big bosom and a broad face covered with beads of perspiration.

  Gretl braced herself for the customary hug and kiss. She lifted her chin, looked the teacher in the eye, held out her hand, and said, “Good morning, Miss Grobler. I’m Grietjie Neethling.” She had practiced it last night, when she was tossing and turning in her warm bed and sleep refused to come.

  She heard someone snort. From the corner of her eye she saw children dive behind their desks. Others stared at her. For a moment she wondered whether she had mispronounced her g’s and r’s.

  The teacher showed her to a seat in the second row, next to a boy with chubby bare feet. The standard twos sat on the side of the classroom, closest to the door, while the standard threes sat next to the window. Auntie Lovey’s Mattie sat alone, right next to the teacher’s desk.

  After they had listened to a Bible story, it was time for arithmetic. Gretl began to relax. The sums were easy. She was first to show her book to the teacher. “Have you finished?” the teacher asked, surprised.

  “Yes,” said Gretl.

  “Yes, Miss,” said Miss Grobler while she checked Gretl’s sums.

  “I beg your pardon?” Gretl asked politely.

  “Say ‘Yes, Miss,’ ” said the teacher.

  She kept forgetting. “Oh. Okay, I will,” she said.

  When she looked up, she saw a few children laughing behind their hands. “Behave!” said the teacher in a stern voice.

  Gretl returned to her desk and sat straight. Her tummy ached. She opened the reading book the teacher had given her. It was easy, she saw. On the first page she read the title. Janet and John and Grade 2. The teacher probably thought she couldn’t read.

  Her heart was racing.

  Then she
felt a tug at her hair. She turned her head. The two boys behind her were pretending to write, but she knew one of them had pulled her hair. She returned to her reading book and tried to tilt her head out of reach.

  Someone yanked the ribbon her mother had taken so much trouble to tie right out of her hair. White-hot anger boiled up inside her. She turned around in her desk. “Behave!” she said sternly.

  The children laughed.

  “Enough! You’re behaving like hooligans!” the teacher warned. “Have you never seen a new pupil before?”

  “Never such a pale one,” said a boy at the back of the class.

  The teacher picked up a thick, round stick and shouted, “Gert, Krisjan, Pietman, come forward! Bend over!”

  Gretl froze. The first boy bent over. The teacher raised the cane high, and brought it down on his backside with such force that he jumped. “Bend!” the teacher roared.

  Bile pushed up in Gretl’s throat. She saw the Gestapo . . .

  She swallowed hard and closed her eyes, but the dull thumping echoed in her ears. One of the boys burst into tears.

  “Be quiet and sit down!” the teacher ordered. “The next one who misbehaves gets three of the best! Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Miss,” the class chanted.

  “Mattie, come and read your lesson.”

  There was complete silence in the classroom. Everyone kept their eyes on their books. Gretl was still feeling nauseated.

  “Grietjie, come and read your lesson.”

  She had forgotten that she was Grietjie. The boy with the chubby feet nudged her. “It’s your turn to read,” he said.

  She grabbed her book, got to her feet, and went to the teacher’s table, but her eyes were misty and she couldn’t make out the words.

  The queasiness pushed up, past her throat. She made a run for it, but she didn’t know where to go. On the veranda outside the classroom her nausea caught up with her.

  The teacher came out to help, but at the smelly outhouse, Gretl threw up again. She was mortified and wondered how she could ever show her face in the classroom again. She rinsed her face, wiped her new uniform with a damp cloth, and drank a little water. At playtime the teacher gave her and the two other girls in her class permission to stay inside because Grietjie was not feeling well.

  The girls kept touching her and asking questions. Gretl answered as best she could. They ate their sandwiches, but Gretl couldn’t eat the sandwich or the sweet her mommy had put in her lunchbox that morning.

  Her pretty white ribbon was missing.

  After playtime the teacher gave them sentences to write. They were in English, and Gretl didn’t understand them at all. She copied the sentences exactly, too afraid to ask what she was supposed to do.

  She tried to focus on the words when the teacher told them a story about Bushmen, but she had no idea who Bushmen were. They were told to draw a picture of their rock paintings. At a complete loss, she drew a picture of a ship at sea.

  At last the final bell sounded and they were allowed to go home. Stiffly she crossed the school grounds to the gate, where her mommy was waiting in her big boxy car. Gretl opened the door, got in, held her head high, and didn’t look at her mommy. Mommy started the car and pulled away. She didn’t ask Gretl any questions.

  When they had left the town behind them, her mommy reached out and drew Gretl close. Gretl couldn’t stop the tears. Mommy stopped under a tree and held Gretl tightly. She was crying too.

  “Never mind, my angel,” she said, “you’re with Mommy now. There now, Mommy’s here.”

  When Gretl stopped crying, her mommy told her in German that she had felt very strange as well when she had first come to these parts, because she had grown up in the city, in Grandpa John’s beautiful English home with carpets on the floors and diamonds in the lights. She had attended an English school and church. She had never even seen an outhouse before. But she loved Gretl’s daddy so much that she came to live with him here on the farm, where he could work in the open air.

  “I’m glad you came to live with Daddy,” Gretl said, “or Kobus and I wouldn’t have had a home.”

  “And I’m glad you came to live with us, or Daddy and I wouldn’t have had a little girl,” said her mommy, in Afrikaans now. “You’ll see, once you get to know the people and they know you, school will be much easier.”

  Gretl nodded earnestly. “At least the children didn’t try to kiss me,” she said.

  Two weeks later Mommy stopped taking her to school by car, and Gretl waited for the school bus at the side of the road with Mattie and his brother and sisters. They never had handkerchiefs, so Gretl gave them hers, but they still didn’t use them.

  Her heart went out to Mattie. He couldn’t read, so he got a hiding every day. Gretl wanted to help him in the afternoons, as she had helped Starika when they had gone to school together. But Mattie smelled really bad, so she gave up on the idea.

  One of the best things in the whole world was driving to town with her father. They drove in the big truck her father had bought from the Defence Force after the war. She had seen many trucks like that in Poland, usually with German soldiers in the back. But she didn’t tell her father this, because she didn’t know if there had been similar trucks in Germany.

  When she and her father drove to town, they talked all the way. Actually, she would chatter and he would say “Mm,” but she knew he was listening. In town they went to the Northern Transvaal Co-op to buy farm supplies and sometimes, if her mother had given them a list, to Cohen Crown General Dealer. Wherever they went, she got out of the truck and went inside with her father. Everyone knew her father and everyone wanted to talk to him, because he knew everything. He was chairman of the Farmers’ Agricultural Union, Kobus had said, and he even talked to the minister.

  Sometimes they went to the station to send oranges or other produce to market. At first she didn’t want to get out at the station at all. But one day, when her father stayed away for a long time, she clambered out of the high truck and went through the small building to the platform. There were only two rows of tracks. To the left was the big water tank that filled the trains’ bellies, and to the right a single track ran straight as an arrow toward the horizon.

  She stood looking at the tracks for a long time, but when a locomotive began to let off steam and the acrid smoke burned the back of her throat, she turned and fled to the safety of her father’s truck.

  Sunday school was almost like school, but different. She had a little book with Bible texts she had to learn by heart and recite to the teacher. It was easy. The teacher told the children Bible stories but, unlike the stories the nuns used to tell them at the convent school, they were not about God’s love. The Sunday school teacher told them scary stories. If they weren’t very, very good and didn’t do everything God wanted, they would burn forever in the great fires of hell. God had a big eye that could see them, no matter where they were.

  One night she dreamed of the devil and the great fire. She thought Mutti and Oma might be in the fire. She couldn’t be sure, because their faces were turned away from her. But she did recognize Jakób.

  “Jakób! Jakób!” she shouted. “Look out for the fire!”

  But he was too far away. He couldn’t hear her.

  He would burn, the lady on the ship explained, because he was a Catholic, and being Catholic was a sin. Beware of the Catholic Threat, she warned. The big eye in the picture on Auntie Lovey’s wall kept following her. Then a storm came from the English Channel and washed everyone overboard into a brown sea filled with frogs. Gretl looked in vain for her father to hold her head above water and keep her safe.

  She woke up, drenched in sweat. She clung to her bl
anky and desperately tried to go back to sleep.

  A week later she found her daddy outside the barn with a piece of iron and a white-hot flame. He was wearing special glasses to protect his eyes and he had taken off his shirt. She could see the muscles in his strong back.

  From a distance she watched as sparks flew from the iron her father was heating and beating into a shape that would fit the horse’s hoof. When it had cooled down, he tacked the shoe onto the hoof with small nails. The horse stood quite still, so she guessed it wasn’t painful.

  When they were sitting on the veranda later that afternoon, she asked, “Doesn’t the fire scare you, Daddy?”

  He shook his head. “No, I control the fire. I get worried sometimes, when the wind suddenly changes direction during a bush fire. But being afraid doesn’t help. You just have to be careful.”

  “I’m not afraid either, except maybe a little of hellfire.”

  Her father frowned. “Who told you about that, Grietjie?”

  “My Sunday school teacher. She says the eye of God sees everything, and if we don’t do as God tells us, we’ll burn eternally in the great fires of hell.”

  “Mm,” her father said. “Some people stress the punishment of a jealous God, who will visit the sins of the fathers on the third and fourth generations of those who hate Him. They live in fear of Almighty God.” She nodded earnestly. She didn’t understand all the words, but she grasped what he was saying.

  “But I believe in a loving God, who, through grace, forgives us when we ask for forgiveness. What do you think, Grietjie?”